April 2009

When you think about all the competing variables that two people bring to a relationship - likes, dislikes, sexual kinks, baggage, addictions, exes, family and mental issues, children - it's amazing human beings last as couples for days or months, let alone years and decades.

Why then do we constantly heap the condemnation of "failure" on any relationship that ends prior to the death of either party or dissolves before the couple get married?

Just because a person has had a series of respectful six or nine month 'relationettes', does this make them any less accomplished than another who's been stuck in a destructive partnership for five years?

I think the tendency to apply the label of failure to relationships that are anything less than perfect saddles many people with impossible expectations and the result is unhappy couples destined to become unrealistic singles ...

As I've written previously, there's a saying that "every man becomes a feminist when he has a daughter" because suddenly guys see their attitudes and that of their mates through the prism of "that could be my little girl they're talking about."

It's a pity the same perception shift doesn't occur in so many women, with huge numbers of mothers continuing to transmit the trivial obsessions of shoe shopping, beauty products and fashion magazines to their baby girls.

It's a bit much to expect men to take the insoluble issues of western gender equality seriously - things like abortion rights, equal pay and sexual discrimination in the workplace - when millions of intelligent women spend their days consumed with what Gwyneth Paltrow is wearing.

If female opinion makers and power brokers spent a quarter of the time they devoted to worrying about which celebrity woman has had plastic surgery, to an issue like universal free day care - the groundswell of media and community pressure would be overwhelming.

Seriously, put free day care on the front page of every woman's magazine for the next six months and tell me it would not be pushed to the forefront of the national consciousness and to the top of the Federal government's agenda where it rightly should be ...

I'm not in the habit of lifting ideas from other blogs but this one sent to me by reader Elizabeth a few months ago struck me as the perfect Friday distraction, as well as great method for you all to distill your thoughts on your professions, hobbies and other cultural oddities.

Back in 2004, an economist named Glen Whitman recounted on his blog Agoraphilia meeting a stranger at bar who asked him "so, what are the Two Things about economics?"

Unsure what the man meant, Glen asked for clarification and the stranger replied: "You know, the Two Things. For every subject, there are really only two things you need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important."

Said Glen: "Oh, okay, here are the Two Things about economics. One: Incentives matter. Two: There's no such thing as a free lunch."

Since then, Glenn has been collecting Two Things by playing the game with people he meets, as I did on a business trip to Melbourne, Wednesday, asking the flight attendant what were the Two Things you had to know about her job.

She thought for a moment and said, "the two things you need to know about being a flight attendant: 1. Safety before service. 2. Have great hair" ...

When you're a boy, there comes a confusing yet thrilling time around age 12 or 13, when you morph from being this sexless "o" floating in gender's alphabet soup, grow a "tail" (♂) so to speak, and become a son of Mars.

Boys have already seen the girls they've grown up with get taller and grow lumps and curves and begin to eye off older dudes. Now the process has started with them, dots join in their heads, the female geometry heaves out of the horizon and suddenly they find themselves forever in The Land of Sex.

Their friends begin talking and lying about it, they can't stop thinking about it and once they get their first girlfriend and some pashing and heavy petting ensues, every thought gets compacted and pushed to the side to give space in their head for ssseeeeeexxxx ...

You might have seen this video last week of two hardhead North Carolina Domino's employees fouling and farting on food for customers in what was a massive public relations disaster for the fast food chain.

However, Doyle, thanks to a seriously well-crafted response, not to mention a sizable dollop of personal presence and integrity has gone a long way towards repairing the damage. The owners of the Coogee Bay Hotel should take note ...

If you're not living under a bridge talking to fleas, you've probably heard the name Susan Boyle and likely been one of the more than 60 million people worldwide who've viewed her variety show performance on YouTube.

I've been thinking a lot about Susan and the similarities in her story to her predecessor, mobile phone salesman Paul Potts who won the first season of the same reality TV show, Britain's Got Talent.

The thing that made Susan's appearance on the show all the more remarkable was that she faced a hostile audience that openly mocked her, yet she silenced and won them over within four or five bars of her rendition of Les Miserables' 'I Dreamed a Dream'.

Potts faced no such hostility during his audition in 2007 and the reason was he knew his place: he was fat, ugly, poorly dressed, a typical schlub and the look on his face when he fronted the judges was almost pitiful - like he was bracing for the inevitable rejection and bullying that had crowded his youth.

Susan Boyle, however, did not know her place: she was old, fat, ugly, dowdy, unemployed and didn't pluck her eyebrows, yet she had sass, she refused to shuffle meekly onto the stage, her body language said "like it or lump it" ...

Early last month the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, Morgan Tsvangirai, was injured in a car accident when his four-wheel-drive collided head-on with a lorry near the capital of Harare. His wife of 31 years, Susan Tsvangirai, died at the scene.

I'm not sure what it was about the accounts of her death but it prompted me to do a bit of reading about Susan and Morgan and was soon touched by the obvious strength of their union.

According to The Independent, Morgan first saw Susan in 1976 when he was a foreman at the mines in Bindura and she was visiting an uncle. "He reportedly nudged the friend who was walking next to him and declared 'That is the girl I am going to marry!'"

Since their marriage in 1978, which bore six children, Susan was by all accounts Morgan's rock as the then-opposition leader survived an assassination attempt, was imprisoned, endured a lengthy treason trial, was badly beaten and this year was shoe-horned into a power-sharing agreement with his long-time foe President Robert Mugabe.

(According to The Independent, the joke doing the rounds in Zimbabwe says that the reason Tsvangirai was brought into the government was so Mugabe "could shoot him from point blank range.")

I reckon Susan Tsvangirai must have been a pretty remarkable woman, who will be dreadfully missed by her husband and for some reason her story and passing really brought home to me just how traumatic it must be to lose your one and only; the person you were put on this earth to walk with ...

One of the greatest obstacles to human development is when people are surrounded solely by individuals who speak the same vocabulary, who share the same assumptions. They start to mistake their fragment of experience as humanity's complete reality.

You see this in all walks of life, from in-bred villages, to entire nations, professions, philosophies, religions, the scientific community, even groups of mates who've sat around the pub since their teens and decided beyond a shadow of a doubt that "this is how the world works and anyone who disagrees is a bloody idiot."

I'm sure you've all been in a conversation or argument with someone and been absolutely nonplussed about how they can believe what they're saying - and sure as anything, they're thinking exactly the same thing about you.

As I've written previously, "we all live in our own movie, shot from our point of view, and we're all absolutely convinced of the veracity of the script we're reading from: our experience of life. Any argument we have with someone is therefore just a glorified pissing contest - our perspective versus theirs - yet so many of us spend hours, careers, wars and marriages trying to prove our stream of urine is clearer, hotter, stronger and goes higher in the air than that of the next person."

The question for today's post is how do we change someone's mind when we have to? How do you generate accord in the face of a competing belief system? And how does one go about opening the mind of a person who doesn't even realise that it's closed? ...

So, before we all say goodbye to each other for the holiday and run into the fluffy pink arms of the Easter Bunny, smear our chocolate lips on loved ones, I thought we'd stay somewhat on topic and try to define the parameters for one of man's most fraught states of existence.

Being pussy-whipped, also known as being under the thumb, is deceptively hard to determine because it can include so many different characteristics, however, we all know when we see it.

Perhaps you have a mate who's abandoned his old caveman ways now he's met that special someone; swapped eccies for echinacea, rooting for "making love", beer for wine with dinner ... and steak?

"Don't be silly, we're vegetarian now," says the new girlfriend as your buddy smiles thinly, the flail falling across his jelly spine ...

Your humble blogger was recently flicking through a copy of the Diaries of Franz Kafka (Volume 1: 1910-1913) when he came upon a little passage that got him thinking.

"The unhappiness of the bachelor, whether seeming or actual, is so easily guessed at by the world around him ... he walks with his coat buttoned ... his hat pulled down over his eyes, a false smile that has become natural to him is supposed to shield his mouth as his glasses do his eyes," writes the great author.

"But everyone knows his condition, can detail his sufferings ... when he dies the coffin is exactly right for him."

Previously, I've made my thoughts clear about marriage and children and the suffocating assumption that to partake in either marks a man as somehow better rounded or more 'normal' than the man who does not.

However lately, I've been doing a semi-subconscious stock-take of my happiness in a relationship as compared to when I was single and, it's safe to say, relationship wins hands down ...

A couple of weeks ago one of All Men Are Liars' readers posted a link to another blog where the writer recounted discovering her ex-husband's secret cache of porn.

"As far as pornography stashes go, it wasn't a big one. Maybe a dozen DVDs, no magazines. But the DVDs themselves ... suffice to say that sample titles included ..." and she went on to list some graphic adult movie names that are best not published in this forum.

The films she cited sounded pretty degrading of women (and some would argue men as well) and the writer went on to make the surprising claim that her ex-husband's use of this type of pornography hurt her more than his physical and emotional abuse.

It made wonder do we have a right to pass judgment on another person's sexual fantasies or are fantasies the ore of reality; a true reflection of a person's character? ...

Maybe everything you've told yourself you know is like the view from a high school window and it's only now, that you've gotten out of class, that you see there is actually room behind the tennis courts, a sloping hill that tumbles down to a creek and beyond that bushland, still cold and snapped still by the overnight frost and then a train track and then more scrub and fields, and mountains.

Maybe you've spent your life worried about the tennis court, the people you see on it, the rules that govern it, the lines and markings until, for sure, you know everything there is to learn about this one stupid game and the people who inhabit this one particular court.

But the thing is, you can't even tell your sister what the water tastes like in that creek and you couldn't even guess where those train tracks go, or the names of the tiny, juicy plants that are licked at by the rain on the mountain ...

It always amuses me to see what advertisers, academics and our cultural elite (hello, Baz Lurhman!) considers to be our national identity; a hodgepodge of larrikin outback stereotypes, salted with surf lifesavers, brave diggers and giggling Aboriginal children.

It's gone on for decades, the agonising uncertainty about who is the archetypal Aussie, when all along it's been under our noses.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the Bad Blood Fight Night at "The Cube" at Campbelltown Catholic Club in Sydney's deep south-west and the answer to the question "who are we?" came to me true and clear: we're bogans.

We like to think they're a tiny sliver of our population that we can mock and look down upon, but the reality is bogans are in the majority and if you can win a Federal Election with 51 per cent of the vote, bogans take the crown of our national identity by a landslide ...

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